The Twins - JLG Clift

Sisters bursting mental blisters with copper nail scissors blood and water gushing out of the daughters in the midst of the monsoon nothing better to do their copy of Twister was tattered and scored and the board had no arrow they didn’t know where to put their feet and no money had stayed in the monopoly game they used to play it’d gone away in fives and tens and hundreds over the years and no there’s nothing left to go and there’s nothing to show for the exit just the red pits of plastic where they used to stay. There’s nothing true about their world or their lives clouds dart and dive dirty woollen knives burying themselves in skies that are all beaten and blue the moon’s full and flawless at the sky’s heart like a cue ball; the twins with matching heads of brittle beige hair twined up into balls with Chinese chopsticks whittled from red marble sit in living reflection no connection to anything nothing lasts neither cast word nor shadow no light below or above they’re just gazing getting nowhere just staring; there’s nothing but the haze of the weather and the harsh contrast between the shouting of the storm and the silence in their Ivy League boarding school dorm red bricks crackling like sticks in Brownie brewed flames back when the twins fought the leering wilderness of wild frontier peeling and popping in the hurricane rain ripping the colour from the stone as it falls from its home in the sky alone to die no not to die it never lived but it’s given millions of lives and now its mad now it’s sad and it wants to take some back the element lacking all remorse steers its course like the horse of death towards the sisters in silk kimonos of red white and blue with skin of milk and teeth of pearl girls drawing breath but for how long? The girls are too wrapped up in the sight of themselves to realise something’s going wrong their eyes blue and green have never seen anything so fierce have never seen nature before have never taken their eyes off each other but now they do for the drunken mother with a hurricane hush her whips of wind rush towards the twins who are guilty of nothing at all beyond self-absorption their world falls into twisting whistling contortions around their ears years of memories whirling around the silence of the dorm drowned in the sound of the scornful storm mementos of once-weres and never-will-be-agains razor sharp sugar glass from souvenir chandeliers floating with feathers from pillows and stuffing from teddy bears tear the skin and the silk as it glides on so slow it looks fast the blood from the girls drawn by the past cycling in the chrome rungs of the cyclone their faces are beaten and blue their skin white their eyes red; Liberty and Ivy the twins of America lie dead their bodies threading through the rubble like vines that have been cut down for reaching too far up into the crown of the atmosphere too fast too sharp and it is here where they died that they will lie found but unmoved their moods drained from their bodies their existence unchanged for the most part; they’re still looking at each other lying in the crackling covers of what they used to own alone, not even the vulture of the hawk or the regale now balding eagle dare to pick the flesh from these girls enmeshed in the rubble their memories in pieces poking out through the foundations like pre-pubescent tufts of stubble because the birds of prey that fly far away from the praying nation paying hand over fist for the actions of the dearly missed daughters know that the flesh is not worth the trouble that it brings after the taste has faded Ivy’s eye tastes like apple pie before it turns putrid and before the twin in the rubble becomes bone, a relic in relics and rags sagging into the shit shaded salt of the land that gave her and her sister birth and has now taken it away because the Twins of America had outstayed their stay and had become lazy, too lazy to even play anymore, too lazy to follow the laws she set out for them; she’s been working to weed the twins out for a while she’s lined their stomachs with dollar green bile that burns right through them in her flem she has spat down disease after disease to try to bring them to their knees to try to stop them staring at each other and look upon their mother and their killer who has now spilled their blood for another, their brother to the East.  But this action, the mother knows, will not give her peace either nor will it enable her to live any longer gleefully, but if the mother must lose herself to her stirring mass of iconoclastic children vampires by choice that take chunks not with their teeth but with bulldozers and oil drills driven in their millions by the voice of a thousand tongues from the top of its lecherous lungs then she will take a few with her she will take what she has given back as the children continue to hack away until there are no children left to speak. The mother will die, meek and mangled in the silence of a world without nations or occupations; a creation left alone to roam freely on its axis, free to be; that is what the mother wants to see.

Seven Past Seven - JLG Clift

It is summer. I am 15 years old. The grass is long in my back garden and it’s been dip dyed back to its dull dying tinge. The beige of sunburn is creeping down through the day as the shade shifts away. It’ll be at the root by sundown. I sit in my room, my box room, my little box room with red walls that have only been painted half way up and a green carpet that can barely be seeing between my drift wood bed and my desk that houses a formerly silver TV/VHS that breaks my childhood favourites whenever I put a video in and press play. A scratchy vinyl of Microcastle is the only constant sound in my life and today that is fleeting. I can barely hear it anymore. It just keeps skipping but I don’t have it in me to just pull the plug. There’s nothing in me anymore.

A Tesco own brand fan from 6 years ago whirs barely blowing at the furthest end of the room on a stack of books that I’ve never read but say I have if anyone ever ask but no one ever asks me.  Dust spirals in clumps around my room from the baby blue blades that have never been cleaned; I can trace the air current if I watch them for long enough, I know, I’ve done it before. The clumps would be bigger but the rusted grey grill of the fan thins them down but it doesn’t stop them. Dust is the closest I’ve come to pollen all July, longer maybe I don’t know. I don’t leave the house and I took the calendars down and broke my clocks. I didn’t want to judge things by time. I didn’t want to live another day enslaved by it after everything but my chains still remain and keep getting heavier with every tick. I never want to see another 11:09 as long as I live. I hit the wall sometimes when I realise that the time comes and goes no matter what I do.

It is the middle of the day and through the static of a shoddy signal I am watching a Countdown rerun upstairs. I don’t leave the room until mum’s gone to work and Rachel’s left to do whatever Rachel does. No one sees me anymore. I don’t leave; I’m not sure whether you can even call yourself alive if no one’s around to see you living. I’m not living, I just happen to be here. The walls are collecting moisture at their corners, the house is sweaty and sick and even though I haven’t been outside today I know the house looks sad. It always does when the sun’s out, something about the way the shade gets thrown at it. My hair is long and greasy and the drops of sweat slithering down my scalp make it feel like my hair is crawling from its roots and raking down my back and into the coils of my stained bed sheets: peroxide hook worms that used to hang on my crown now roam my room. I’ll never see my hair again. My nails are starting to corkscrew into where my finger prints used to be before they burnt away.

I call around, no one’s home; no one’s around to come round to mine. I forget what happened sometimes, just for a minute. I want to get up, I want to move, I want to wash and eat and run and do all those things kids on daytime television do in good weather in their Californian gardens with their care free friends from good neighbourhoods. No I don’t. I just think I should want those things. I don’t want anything anymore. I don’t want to live, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to be, I don’t want to see, I don’t want to breathe but I don’t want to drown. I don’t know that I’m able to want anymore.  That's a part of it all.

The floor’s splintering away beneath my feet on the plain between my room and the bathroom, I drag my soles across ash wood shards but I don’t feel much. I barely bleed. My mirror is still shattered in the sink; no one’s cleaned it up. I still feel that, I still feel the reflection of the person I didn’t recognize splitting my knuckles as it disappeared into a dozen reflections of the ceiling then the window then the light bulb then finally the underside of the faucet rocking back and forth at the bottom of the mildew laced basin. I did it so I wouldn’t remember, but I remembered anyway.

It’s 3 in the afternoon. I have been lying in an empty bath for a while now silently. I don’t sleep, my eyes just close and then they open again. I don’t sleep, and I don’t dream. I just remember. Remember the class of boys in black blazers and grey slacks with tartan ties and boiling eyes and bubbling lips and leaking cheeks and sizzling skin turning into puddles in a mist of accidental mustard gas that my oldest friend had made in science class just to see if he could.

He’d been talking about it all year, talking and talking, Dennis gnawed my ear off talking about how amazing it’d be to make some. Not to use, never to use, Dennis wasn't crazy like people said; he just to know he could make some. Dennis wanted to know what I felt like to do something he really, under no circumstances, was never supposed to do. He told me that less than 1 per cent of people will ever know that feeling; Dennis always wanted to know everything. He wanted to know what everything felt like, he wanted to feel everything the world had to offer, he didn’t care whether it felt good or bad, all that mattered to Dennis was that it felt.  Dennis was just fooling around, he never thought it’d work, he thought the wiki recipe was bogus for a start and so did I; I wasn’t at the other end of the room because I thought it would work, I was just buying a tens off of Messai while Miss was out.

There was a hiss and a fizz like someone had dropped a couple of Mentos in a bottle of Coke, only it was more aggressive. I turned just in time to see the student most likely to do anything turn to nothing on the spot. I watched his bones turn to stew in his cheeks; I saw his blonde undercut become a steaming broth on his crown as his face slipped down his chest down his trousers to the floor.

They said the fact that I managed to ball myself up in the incubation chamber saved my life. I told them I didn’t see anything, but I did. I saw it all. To dodge the slew of sensationalist journalists I  said I closed my eyes, but I had them wide open. I told them everyone died quickly at the funeral where there was nothing left to bury because anything that got put in the coffin would just have been absorbed into the sheets. I never told them I had to hold the glass panel down with bubbling hands as my science class came charging towards me for sanctuary their palms peeling away into pastel pink paste on the pane with every swing they took to break it open. I had to hold the glass down, through all the screams, through all the begging, until my friends became nothing more than mounds of sludge around my incubator. Dennis was the last to go.

I still see his scream, the vocal chords pranging like plucked strings through his vanishing Adam’s apple and between the strings I remember the clock face and I remember the time. 11:09. It only took a minute for it all to happen, maybe less; break started at 10 past. At 11:09 I stopped being a child with friends, I became the Joseph Merrick of Muswell Hill suburbia; I became the major piece of evidence in a borough wide lawsuit against AQA; I became a piece of prime quick buck journalism: the burns victim survivor of a disaster in a secondary school science lab brought about by negligent teaching and a dangerous syllabus. I stopped being handsome, girls stopped looking at me and left the room when I so much as breathed. I stopped being called Jackson. I stopped being called anything. I stopped playing sports, I stopped talking, I stopped being. I can still hear all the gasps as the firemen carried me out. No one knew who I was; my own mother didn’t believe the doctors until I told her myself. She’s never been able to look at me since, she just leaves for work and comes home and stays downstairs. She doesn’t speak; she never comes up to my room. She leaves my meals half way up the stairs and then runs for safety behind a locked door. I’ve forgotten what she looks like nearly, and she’s tried her best to forget me.

I don't remember what she sounds like anymore, I think there was a northern twang to her voice but maybe that's just something I made up.

It is seven. I am smoking the tens I got from Messai, the tens that I was buying for Dennis.  I haven’t smoked once since Dennis dissolved. There’s no tobacco to cut it, I roll a purey as someone on Deal or No Deal gets the crowd to chant YOLO increasingly aggressively as the seal on the last box is broken. It's almost tribal. The player swapped out at the last minute. Everyone’s on tenterhooks. The zoot tastes like ash and gives me nothing but a cough.

It is seven past seven. I am tying the school belt that I will never wear again around my neck and I am pinning my belt to the ceiling with a nine inch nail I pulled from my shelf that housed unread classics. The leather tenses and cracks, cold, tight. I jump from the bed I used to bounce on when I was small and the box room felt bigger. The whole room thuds and ripples in my rolling eyes and in my double vision daze the rouge of the red rambles up the walls all the way to the ceiling and the room looks complete. I realise the room isn’t sweating anymore and that the beads have turned to shards of permafrost on the walls. Mum is sobbing in her sleep. This is the time she doesn’t want to live through again. My feet are drifting down towards the carpet. I can see the carpet through my soles and the carpet is bare apart from the dust. The belt thrusts through my neck, lynching nothing but air because I’m not there to hang; I’m not anywhere. I’m a suicide hiding from the light in the darkness of my last Summer day. I forget that too sometimes.

The player got the penny. I think. Can’t remember, catch it tomorrow. Same time, same place.

It will still be Summer. I will still be 15 years old. And the clock in the lab will continue to cycle. And everyone will be moving on by doing the same things over and over again. Time repeats. Time repeats, so we do.

Party People Lurk Below the Pharaoh's Steeple - JLG Clift

It’s the wildest Hippie fest I’ve never seen or been to daisy-chain-child galore dry ground beneath bare feet psychedelic dyes on big cotton sheets are the staple contents of the big coloured tents that are up all over the site and stay on the ground like lazy kites too lazy to expand into the crackling black of the neon night here at Glastonbury; I lie in the sunset picking berries from a bag for life that was filled to the brim by the Fruit Troops supercharged on MD and flower power they decided to shower us with healthy snacks in all of their wealthiest colours: techni colour rains of red and blue and black and green and yellow thud around us into the lime green of the grass and the golden brown of the camp grounds; we’re mellow never dropped into a good trip when it wasn’t night out before my hands are turning into cat paws and I’m batting around a ball of apple come yarn strung loose the fraying strings sing about things that I can scarcely decode and there’s a maroon toad where my mobile used to be ribitting rings rippling towards me at warped speeds; the seeds from my tangerine are little men who leaned on their sides one day and can’t remember how to rise they have no eyes and no mouths and no lips and no hips just arms and legs and stories that erupt into orchestral snoring because they get bored of telling them half way through; the chorus of snores and the flailing strings spilling new age lore are failing to feel me with dread I just let them unfurl around the curls of my eggshell claws as I shred the ball to threads the day starts to come through as the woollen apple thins gin’s going around and is going down my throat I take a toke of something good that a man who swears blind he’s a hermit crab offered me (he’s a PCP freak my newly engaged mate with the pierced ears opening into black holes filled with bright white light tells me) his tent’s bold and red and fused to his waist with duct tape that looks like a jagged band of solder.

Jagger’s playing loud and proud as ever writhing between the strings of the freshly baked night set to simmer the crowd showing no signs of thinning just flowing and going and going out and out from the front of the stage shouting raging waving caving in at sections like a fumbling scrum all their fingers toes and thumbs missing prints all their faces whitewashed of expression in the neon tint the crowd of everyone rushing forwards the people gushing towards the frontman but the bouncers bear the brunt and the rouge stunt comes to nothing more than a stage full of punts to the teeth and fists to the face and the crowd of everyone races on in pulsing waves slaves to the beat feet to temple but despite the chaos their movements feel so gentle from back here tears of joy rolling down my reddened cheeks and still the strings and the hermit man speak and I’ve become weakened by the wonder that surrounds.

The Hermit man started to look older and kept getting older and lower as the day turned to dark in the flowing glows of the headline act his crab claw hands that had their youth intact only hours ago withering into tired clumps of shell at the end of scrawny arms that used to swell with muscle; he’s been coming to the hustle and bustle of the festival since he was eighteen and although he’s been haggard by the fun he’s had he’s not mad at all he’s smiling his incomplete smile that’s met crystals of meth and sheets of worn concrete many a time for either crimes or for existing depending on how much of the fact is in his blistering barrage of exploits and carnage that conjure echoes of Thompson’s coverage of the Nixon campaign and it’s hard to take the strain of the Hornby train that’s now a viper fixed on tracks threading itself around my head and neck my paws are still taking the ball apart it’s down to the raw of the core now it’s all pinky and pulpy like pot noodle porridge mixed with synthetic yarn drooling clear tar that feels like toe jam as it slams in wads and clumps with feathered thumps onto my face chunks and chunks that I can’t even see and can scarcely feel are more real than the steel of the stage or the sage wisdom of the Hermit man part crab part man part can who’s going to go back to driving his (repeatedly) keyed white van come Monday it’s Sunday but I want to stay I want to get baked on cooling brownies cooked on gleaming golden trays I don’t want to deal with anything except this malaise of mixed mirages and the great sounds that used to only greet the walls of suburban garages but that are now hitting the stage with a passion and a rage and an energy that rips through me repeatedly riff by riff drop by drop until everything’s gone even my name: I’ll be Mr Smith member of the crowd of everyone, no forename to frame my face or my life Mr Smith free of the strife of my inner city job and the well-dressed mobs rutting in packs like mutts in their lifts and trains I want to hang on here in this farcical plain where I’m not maimed by the claws of reality but my mind is already starting to take me from the tame of my trance and I’m starting to see the people that I thought were so pretty dancing for what they are and what they were and what they may always be acne scarred teens hopped up on Mandy stirring in circles like teaspoons in old cups of tea left on the side too long gone cold getting old and stale turning pale in the grey display of sunrise the colour in their cheeks was only there by the grace of the neon and the strobes and the face paint and pretty soon we’re all going to leave to be tainted by the stains of suburbia and city and countryside but I don’t feel as sad as I might, this people’s palace found under the Pharaoh’s steeple will be here next year for us to all come to hide and vibe in again and I will drop under the small top of my lazy kite again and I will be free to see the world through my intoxicated psychedelic sights. For the right price of course.